First Look: Conception

There are a lot of worthy shows we have yet to write up this season, like Bloom into You and the surprisingly delightful Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny-Girl Senpai, but I just had to write about Conception immediately. It’s terrible, but it’s terrible in a way that’s just hilarious to me personally.

I guess you could say it’s “so bad it’s good,” except for a lot of people, I think it’s really just going to register as normal-bad. And that’s fine, but if I’m getting some enjoyment out of it, no matter how perverse, I gotta give it credit for that.

We start out with a bunch of oh-so-sexy female silhouettes, letting us know immediately what kind of show this is. But there’s something wrong with these illustrations; I can’t figure out what it is, but these women’s bodies look weird to me. Like everyone looks kind of sinewy and detailed in the wrong places. This isn’t the OP, is it? This better not be the OP. That would just be sad.

What is going on with this poor girl’s body? I think that’s supposed to be her butt in the foreground, but it looks more like her knees, doesn’t it? Maybe she’s a zombie and she can twist her pelvis a complete 180 degrees around? Curious.

We open with our protagonist, Itsuki, learning that his cousin (and close friend) Mahiru is pregnant. Who’s the father? No one, apparently; Mahiru just up and became pregnant, without ever having sex. See, this is where the show wastes a perfectly good plot, because I was soready for her baby to be Jesus Mark Two, and then that doesn’t happen. I mean, think about it; imagine a normal high-school based anime, except the main girl is magically pregnant, and you don’t know if the baby is going to be Jesus 2.0 or the Antichrist? And all the other characters are trying to figure out whether or not her baby is going to bring about Armageddon based on her pregnancy symptoms? That could be a quality show. Alas, we are not so lucky.

Itsuki and Mahiru then get sucked into another world (update your “Number of Official Isekai shows this season” lists), then Mahiru basically vomits up a demon. We later learn that this is what Star Maidens do to clean out impurities in their systems; expel badly-animated monsters. I hope that if I expel a monster to purify my uterus someday, it looks cooler than a villain out of the 1980s My Little Pony cartoon.

This is the “monster.” Was the guy who normally does the lighting and shading out sick that day? Because the entire scene with this dude looks unfinished. Maybe it would be understandable if the show wanted to put the emphasis on the sex scenes, but seeing as how there are NO actual sex scenes….

Itsuki manifests a magic sword, because he is a magical hero sort of fellow, and vanquishes it. Some exposition later, we learn that this world relies upon visitors from other worlds to fight evil for them, for some reason. So Itsuki and Mahiru are the latest pair pulled from Earth to help fight the monsters of the labyrinth.

Wait a minute…if the monsters are in the labyrinth, can’t you just leave them there? Is it really necessary to fight them? I mean, I guess we have to assume that the monsters of the labyrinth will break out eventually if they aren’t dealt with, but we don’t know that; for all we know, there’s no need to fight these monsters at all and the Powers that Be just want something shiny at the bottom of the dungeon.

Itsuki flirts with a doctor examining him, who seems to reciprocate his feelings, and we get a lot of lewd camera angels of her. Of course, if Itsuki and the doctor hooked up, that would just be regular, consensual sex without any morally reprehensible element of coercion, so of course this show wants nothing whatsoever to do with that.

To save this world (or fight the monsters in the labyrinth to get the shiny thing located in the chest on the bottom floor, who knows), Itsuki must impregnate 12 “Star Maidens,” of which his cousin Mahiru is one. The magical Star Children that result from these, err, encounters, will fight the monsters. Why can’t Itsuki just fight them off himself? He already has a magical sword, which is usually 95% of what you need to defeat JRPG monsters, so I’m a bit unclear if this whole baby factory is really necessary.

That aside, when Itsuki “impregnates” someone, that’s not really what happens; we’re told that the baby just “pops out,” presumably through a portal or something, so there’s no actual pregnancy and no process of childbirth. Damn, where do I sign up? I’d become a Star Maiden if it meant I could have another kid without going through all that nonsense again. Okay, so maybe I’m not a Holy Virgin or whatever (TMI?), but my Star Child would have many useful properties! Primarily, any child of mine is guaranteed to love the absolute fuck out of mindless dungeon-crawling, and if the game this show is based on is any indication, that’s something a hero in this universe is definitely going to need. Vote for Karen for Aries Star Maiden this November, I won’t let you down.

Anyway! These two cousins need to get it on, stat! And here’s where things start to get really hilariously awkward. The two of them are led to a bed, and Itsuki is wearing handcuffs because…why? It’s never explained, he’s just handcuffed for no reason. Then he tries to take off Mahiru’s halter top, but not only has he apparently never seen this item of clothing before, he seems to be unfamiliar with the concept of clothing in general. He seriously tries for like 10-20 seconds, with his handcuffed hands, to take off Mahiru’s top by pulling down on one of her little spaghetti straps, and this is when I started laughing out loud. Why doesn’t he just take the shirt off over her head? How did he get this old without knowing how shirts work?

I don’t think I can really explain just how bizarre and unsexy this is. This poor kid is being forced, essentially at gunpoint, to have sex with his cousin, except he’s handcuffed, has a fear of shirts, and both partners are being harassed by a horny stuffed animal who seems to have no role in the plot other than to recite sophomoric euphemisms for sex, non-stop. I mean, I’m sure one of the main criticisms this show is going to get is that it’s “really just porn,” or something like that, but I find it hard to believe that anyone is seriously aroused by this.

I mean, hey, I don’t judge: if you find this kind of thing really sexy, more power to you, I guess? But it’s about as intuitive as finding a scuba-diving giraffe sexy, it just doesn’t seem like it’s meant for that purpose.

So we don’t get to see the sex, because if there’s one thing you never get to see on one of these “really just porn” shows, it’s actual sexy times. Considering there’s 12 Star Maidens and 12 episodes to the season, it seems like a safe guess that each episode of this show will focus on Itsuki courting a different girl…except it isn’t really courting, because they have no choice in the matter. These girls have been raised from birth to create magic kids, so I’m not sure why there needs to be any preamble to the sex. Itsuki’s going to be like “It is time to make a Star Child,” and the girl will be like “Yes, time to do our duty to the Fatherland,” and then it will fade to black, for the sake of all the sex we’re not seeing, and will never get to see. What are they going to do with the other 23 minutes of the episode? It’s mysterious.

There really isn’t a good reason to recommend this show, but personally, I just have to see how they continue to make this allegedly fanservice-centered show the unsexiest thing in the universe. If this show were competent, there would be a place to discuss the disturbing implications of the coercive sex inherent in the premise, and so on and so forth. But this show is just too ridiculous for that; in order to be disturbed by it, you’d have to take it seriously for at least five seconds, and I don’t believe that’s possible.

This is actually supposed to be Itsuki’s crotch, we think, but whenever they zoom out, there’s no bulge and it just looks really weird.

Lifesong:

When I think of Conception the first thing that comes to mind is now red boxers. I felt like half the episode was spent panning around the protagonist’s crotch. He’s stuck getting “examined” by some nurse, tied to a bed.

Why does the protagonist spend such a long time tied to a bed, you might ask? Well, they had to info-dump the dungeon crawling stuff somehow. Why not explain the how and why of magical baby-making with slow pans over a nurse leering at the dude’s package? There was even reciprocal leering! The protagonist leers at the nurse in her tight, form-fitting outfit while she leers at his red boxers. The whole thing reminded me of one of the bathing scenes from the Monogatari, only it wasn’t over-the-top enough to clue anyone in on the joke.

This first episode is funny. It’s funny because it’s awkward. It’s also lame, and lame because the storytelling is awful. It wants to be taken seriously, but doesn’t deserve any serious thought. I want to stress that those are two different things. It’s bad, but not because the comedy is failing. The storytelling is just super dumb; It’s the method more than the content. And on a certain level, that’s pretty damn impressive. I’m basically telling you that the storytelling is dumber than the premise.

I actually enjoyed this episode a good deal and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I was laughing the entire time. I’ll almost certainly watch another episode or two. It’s so awkward it’s hilarious. It’s like a nerdy teenage who just hit puberty singing I’m Too Sexy completely off-key and expecting to be taken seriously.

As far as info dumps go I’ve seen worse than slow pans and service shots, but there was something special about the animation here. The magic was in the way the camera gets too close for anyone to actually be sure of what’s supposed to be on the screen. One more element to make the whole thing funnier than it should have been.

If I felt like this episode had been attempting comedy I’d be giving the staff two thumbs up…but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t. Some other elements like the protagonist forgetting how shirts work may have been intentionally awkward… I think they were going for sympathy with the protagonist’s I’m-about-to-get-laid panic, but it didn’t quite work. The mascot character was probably intended to be funny, but is actually the most cringe-worthy part of the whole episode.

I enjoyed Conception for all the wrong reasons. I remember enjoying the game Conception 2 back when it released– at least the first 10 hours or so, which is all I played of it. Now I’m wondering if that game’s story was equally dumb, or if this anime version of the franchise is just in a class all its own.